After yesterday's claim that Linux is losing out to Windows XP as the netbook operating system of choice, here come some numbers - from a separate source - that show the shift more clearly.
According to an unnamed Taiwanese market watcher cited by Chinese-language newspaper the Economic Daily News - all by way of local newssite …

COMMENTS

Small cheap computers?

Well they succeed on 33% of that moniker nowadays, mostly. You acknowledge the field has been shifting towards larger, more expensive models (where pre-installed Windows represents a smaller proportion of the retail price) but I see no evidence this is actually what customers want, at least as a bigger influence than greedy manufacturers fleecing us.

Yes, greedy manufacturers, who can add a couple of inches on to the size, sell it as "bigger and better" whilst removing the smaller options from the shelves, leaving the average gullible punter with no choice. Those couple of inches mean they can share more parts with full size bargain-bucket laptops, so they are probably actually cheaper to manufacture than 7" or 9" models, but can be sold for the significantly higher prices as we're seeing.

Hopefully the arrival of the ARM based netbooks from Pegatron, Qualcomm etc pencilled in for the summer will shake things up again.

I read another article today....

Another article elsewhere on the Linux vs Windows topic quoted a report suggesting Linux would be taken on by much more people over the next year or 2 as the financial situation starts to make people cut spending.

I also tend to agree with the first comment... Products that aren't available for sale can't be counted. Thus the statistics are skewed.

No wonder

Linux could be wonderful on netbooks but based on my fathers experience with sled 10 and the ones I've seen in shops, with firefox 2. something, they've really been badly put together. No wonder their must have been a lot of returns on these.

MS mafia

As stated by otheres here, products not available can't be bought. Last year it was fairly easy to buy a Linux netbook everywhere, now it has become quite hard to find one and I wouldn't be surprised at all, if that's because MS has put considerable pressure on the manufacturers to 'phase out' Linux in favour of XP.

This shows again that MS dominance of the desktop is only based on the mafia-style methods of MS, in a free market MS would probably be bust by now.